Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Just a Little News

On Big Day, 'WSJ' Employees Hit Company -- in 'NY Times' Ad
While Dow Jones is touting the debut of a skinnier Wall Street Journal today, many employees at the paper want to see more heft. The union representing staffers at the Journal took out an ad today in a rival, The New York Times, calling into question Dow Jones’ commitment to quality journalism.

Coverage of black community questioned
Bruce Lightner wrote to Executive Editor Melanie Sill to complain that the paper was not covering events, especially positive stories that reflect favorably on the black community. He cited four events in Raleigh during November and December, including a mayor's Unity Breakfast to discuss diversity and race relations. "For The N&O not to cover the mayor's breakfast is absolutely inexcusable," he told me later. "I just can't fathom why The N&O didn't have somebody there."

Vaporized: $13.5B in news stock value
In a dramatic repudiation of newspapers by investors, the shares of publicly held publishing stocks in the last two years lost nearly $13.5 billion in value, or 20.5% of their market capitalization.To put this in perspective, the vaporized value is greater than the enterprise value of the Tribune Co. or the combined value of the McClatchy, New York Times and Media General publishing companies.

'07 may be year bloggers break free of all the hype
Amid the continued popularity of the phenomenon, there are mounting signs that blogging is fast reaching its saturation point. Blog watcher Technorati was tracking 57 million blogs at the end of October, adding about 100,000 new blogs to its list each day. No one expects that pace to hold, and technology analyst Gartner Inc. believes that this will be the year that blogging peaks.

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